Kingsbury Country Day School in Addison Township is reducing its tuition by a significant amount in the hopes of attracting new students to its 125-acre campus at 5000 Hosner Rd.

“We want to grow our enrollment and grow our alumni data base,” said Kingsbury Headmaster Tom Mecsey. “We want to grow our marketing strategies and to do that, we felt we had to begin by making ourselves more accessible to people with average incomes.”

Tuition for first through eighth grades is being lowered from $13,300 to $9,500 per year. The kindergarten rate will decrease from $12,500 to $8,550 annually.

Even the junior kindergarten (JK) program will experience reductions in price.

Three-day JK will drop from $7,200 to $6,333 annually. Four-day JK will decrease from $9,300 to $7,125 per year. Five-day JK will be lowered from $11,300 to $8,075 annually.

All of these new rates will take effect during the 2012-13 school year.

Currently, Kingsbury is responsible for educating 90 students. Over the next three years, the independent school hopes to have 150 students.

“We’re looking at almost doubling our enrollment,” Mecsey said. “Our capacity is larger. We could go as high as 180. But our parents still want to maintain small class sizes. We like to keep class-size averages around 15. We have the capacity in each grade for 18, but 15 seems to be the right size for the dynamic we have here at Kingsbury.”

Right now, the student-to-teacher ratio is about 9:1.

So what sets Kingsbury apart of other schools, both public and private?

“We’ve worked hard over the past few years to maintain a traditional-type of education – reading, writing, arithmetic and respect,” Mecsey explained. “But we’ve also been moving toward developing skills for the 21st century. We have a very, very strong curriculum now.”

“Whereas we once boasted that after graduating from Kingsbury, our students will be well-prepared for whatever high school they choose to attend, we can now say, after graduating from Kingsbury Country Day School, our students will be well-prepared for success as global citizens in careers that, in many cases, have yet to be created,” Mecsey noted.

Kingsbury is an authorized International Baccalaureate World School (Primary Years Programme).

Kingsbury also stresses ecology and sustainable living as an integral part of its curriculum. “We have the uniqueness of being situated on a 125-acre campus with a strong environmental studies program,” Mecsey said.

In addition to offering innovative classes, Mecsey believes Kingsbury “can always provide a much smaller, safer environment than some of our competitors can.”

“Because of our size, we have a sense of community that is very difficult to duplicate at many other schools,” he said. “We’re small enough where every family knows every other family. We take care of each other’s kids. It’s a safe, friendly, warm environment.”